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Is moderation of the internet really the answer here? That suggestion only treats the symptoms and not the root cause of alienation, lack of moral centre, unrestrained rage, etc. Is in not of benefit to be aware of who these people are in order to move forward with some sort of viable long term solution? I am not sure what that solution would look like but I know for example Jordan Peterson was out and about trying to herd these kids from 4chan to convince them that responsibility and personal accountability would improve their quality of life. I don't want to take this too far off course but when you are moderating "hate speech" who decides what hate speech is... ie. Twitter will ban Milo for making fun of an actress but doesn't lift a finger about actual terrorist organizations overseas.

Sorry if I just missed this here, but can we talk about the people here who are criticizing the police officer for not shooting the suspect?

Yeah, when I first read that, I was like "are you shitting me?". But then they made a point...if the guy had just been witnessed mowing people down and was now holding what appeared to be a firearm while surrounded by other people, do the police have a responsibility to incapacitate him as quickly as possible before he kills anyone else? Or now that he's ditched one weapon (van) for another (gun), do you wait to see if he actually uses the latter before asserting lethal force?

I'm normally 100% "try to intervene without shooting", and on the whole, I'm still really glad (and impressed) that this officer was able to pull things off the way he did. But this argument actually made me stop and think.

Is moderation of the internet really the answer here? That suggestion only treats the symptoms and not the root cause of alienation, lack of moral centre, unrestrained rage, etc. Is in not of benefit to be aware of who these people are in order to move forward with some sort of viable long term solution? I am not sure what that solution would look like but I know for example Jordan Peterson was out and about trying to herd these kids from 4chan to convince them that responsibility and personal accountability would improve their quality of life. I don't want to take this too far off course but when you are moderating "hate speech" who decides what hate speech is... ie. Twitter will ban Milo for making fun of an actress but doesn't lift a finger about actual terrorist organizations overseas.

People have been dealing with alienation, lack of moral center and unrestrained rage for as long as humans exists. Societal structures used to keep these things in check.

The internet is taking away power from physical communities, and creating virtual communities. The virtual communities are the ones these people are living in, so you can have someone who's misogynistic sitting next to a feminist on the bus, and both will think that the community is on their side, because their own communities are. They may be neighbors, but they're not in the same community anymore.

People have been dealing with alienation, lack of moral center and unrestrained rage for as long as humans exists. Societal structures used to keep these things in check.

The internet is taking away power from physical communities, and creating virtual communities. The virtual communities are the ones these people are living in, so you can have someone who's misogynistic sitting next to a feminist on the bus, and both will think that the community is on their side, because their own communities are. They may be neighbors, but they're not in the same community anymore.

People have been dealing with alienation, lack of moral center and unrestrained rage for as long as humans exists. Societal structures used to keep these things in check.

The internet is taking away power from physical communities, and creating virtual communities. The virtual communities are the ones these people are living in, so you can have someone who's misogynistic sitting next to a feminist on the bus, and both will think that the community is on their side, because their own communities are. They may be neighbors, but they're not in the same community anymore.

The Internet is now a digital library, it's a digital archive, it's a digital courthouse (pretty much all courts throughout the United States are transferring court filings to digital instead of paper; the U.S. Federal court has *required* online filing for several years); legal documents are all shifting to digital formats; the Secretary of States in all states in the United States are shifting to digital formats; most of the Federal government offices are operated online; I just renewed my Firearms Owners Identification Card in Illinois via the Illinois State Police online, including uploading a selfie (no more having to get a photo at Walmart); most law firms and lawyers now store legal documents "in the cloud" as backup; nearly all county recorders offices across the country have digital documents available for look-up online; entire law libraries have replaced books with online search services like West Law and LexixNexis; HOME AND BUSINESS SECURITY is now monitored via the Internet; banking is now conducted pretty much entirely through the Internet.

These days, you can close an entire transaction via the Internet (real estate, the stock exchange, everything). Hell, in real estate law, we don't even use the fucking PHONE, anymore. When my phone rings, I get startled, like "WHO THE FUCK IS CALLING ME!?" Lol.

We can't just "shut down" the "Internet."

As for 4Chan, there needs to be an investigation as to what can possibly be done to contain it; if it's a cesspool that proliferates hate speech, then it's really no different than, say, a terrorist training group.

Sorry if I just missed this here, but can we talk about the people here who are criticizing the police officer for not shooting the suspect?

Yeah, when I first read that, I was like "are you shitting me?". But then they made a point...if the guy had just been witnessed mowing people down and was now holding what appeared to be a firearm while surrounded by other people, do the police have a responsibility to incapacitate him as quickly as possible before he kills anyone else? Or now that he's ditched one weapon (van) for another (gun), do you wait to see if he actually uses the latter before asserting lethal force?

I'm normally 100% "try to intervene without shooting", and on the whole, I'm still really glad (and impressed) that this officer was able to pull things off the way he did. But this argument actually made me stop and think.

I don't want to get into the legal weeds too much, here, but I believe there are different laws and legal precedents in Canada than here in the United States.

In the United States, the police tend to shoot first and ask questions later because they can; this is based on several Supreme Court of the United States rulings that ruled that if an officer was afraid for his/her life, he/she could use deadly force (known as "shoot first, think later") which protects officers. The argument AGAINST this has been that it removes the other person's right to due process; but, so far, the conservative justices have made several rulings in favor of police, so police know they can shoot and kill without fear of getting into trouble; there is also the strong backing of police unions in this country that use the SCOTUS rulings as backup. See the most recent ruling on April 2, which makes the it even worse.

Technically, all perpetrators SHOULD survive so they can be brought to trial, not just for due process but to determine if they worked alone, if they had accomplices, if they had a motive, if that motive included foreign agents, etc.

Sorry if I just missed this here, but can we talk about the people here who are criticizing the police officer for not shooting the suspect?

Yeah, when I first read that, I was like "are you shitting me?". But then they made a point...if the guy had just been witnessed mowing people down and was now holding what appeared to be a firearm while surrounded by other people, do the police have a responsibility to incapacitate him as quickly as possible before he kills anyone else? Or now that he's ditched one weapon (van) for another (gun), do you wait to see if he actually uses the latter before asserting lethal force?

I'm normally 100% "try to intervene without shooting", and on the whole, I'm still really glad (and impressed) that this officer was able to pull things off the way he did. But this argument actually made me stop and think.

Layers upon layers of fuckery... there's no doubt in my mind that he survived that encounter because of his racial privilege. There have been countless cases before of Toronto cops 'shooting first' and only once has there been any legal conviction in response. Even after this guy went on a horrendous killing spree fueled by radicalized misogynist fury, he gets spared; and in response, we're seeing lots of deeply toxic masculinity on display from people freely saying he should be sexually assaulted in prison for surviving. Um, great work everyone.

And fucking LOL
@mfte
and the concept of J. Peterson being some pied piper for these awful MRA shit-stains... he's just spouting more vacuous bullshit to earn a buck off of them. JP is an intellectual-for-hire, just like Levant and all those other sorry fuckheads getting in bed with him over at Rebel Media, endlessly crowdfunding their daily derangement, while lone-wolf terrorists like Alexandre Bissonnette and probably also this guy have been buying their trolling, and buying the Trumpist alt-right fury line, and getting inspired to kill.

You're goddamned right we should ban hate speech from the web, OF COURSE INCLUDING terrorist groups, and the social media sites could start doing it TOMORROW if we and our governments demanded it. But it won't happen; we'll get empty platitudes and more spending on security measures instead. In case it's not clear, I'm still reeling with disgust and anger and sadness over this. The stories of the victims' families and friends so far have just been heart-rending, and we're only starting to hear more. I'm going to have to log off for a few days and put my head into work just to feel remotely normal.

@botley
I'm not saying he's some pied piper. I was just giving an example of what a solution / engagement might look like. I have to make an assumption that a lot of these kids lack proper male roll models. I find Peterson to be a bit of an alarmist and at times short sighted but I never found him to be malicious, disingenuous or act in a way that would make me put him in the same bucket as Levant and Gavin McInnes.

What are these countless instances of Toronto Police shooting people dead? The guy who took a hostage at Union station? Sammy Yatim? Andrew Loku the guy who came at a police officer with a hammer? Countless? There have been about 11 instances in the last 10 years. And what about racial privilege? Sammy Yatim looked just as "white" as Minassian.

Not sure about Canada, but the United States Supreme Court has weighed in on this several times, in favor of free speech; most recently, Metal v Tam (June 19, 2007).

Those few categories of speech that the government can regulate or punish—for instance, fraud, defamation, or incitement—are well established within our constitutional tradition. See United States v. Stevens, 559 U. S. 460, 468 (2010). Aside from these and a few other narrow exceptions, it is a fundamental principle of the First Amendment that the government may not punish or suppress speech based on disapproval of the ideas or perspectives the speech conveys. See Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U. S. 819, 828–829 (1995).

The Government may not insulate a law from charges of viewpoint discrimination by tying censorship to the reaction of the speaker’s audience. The Court has suggested that viewpoint discrimination occurs when the government intends to suppress a speaker’s beliefs, Reed, supra, at ___–___ (slip op., at 11–12), but viewpoint discrimination need not take that form in every instance. The danger of viewpoint discrimination is that the government is attempting to remove certain ideas or perspectives from a broader debate. That danger is all the greater if the ideas or perspectives are ones a particular audience might think offensive, at least at first hearing. An initial reaction may prompt further reflection, leading to a more reasoned, more tolerant position. Indeed, a speech burden based on audience reactions is simply government hostility and intervention in a different guise. The speech is targeted, after all, based on the government’s disapproval of the speaker’s choice of message. And it is the government itself that is attempting in this case to decide whether the relevant audience would find the speech offensive. For reasons like these, the Court’s cases have long prohibited the government from justifying a First Amendment burden by pointing to the offensiveness of the speech to be suppressed.

To me, though, this 4Chan stuff that was posted crosses the line from "hate speech" to online radicalization leading to acts of domestic terrorism. The U.S. Patriot Act would define this as an act of domestic terrorism.

In Canada, it also appears that what happened the other day is legally an act of domestic terrorism.

In Canada, section 83.01 of the Criminal Code[1] defines terrorism as an act committed "in whole or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause" with the intention of intimidating the public "…with regard to its security, including its economic security, or compelling a person, a government or a domestic or an international organization to do or to refrain from doing any act." Activities recognized as criminal within this context include death and bodily harm with the use of violence; endangering a person’s life; risks posed to the health and safety of the public; significant property damage; and interference or disruption of essential services, facilities or systems.

When we think of victims of terrorism, we need to consider the issues that relate to the different levels of victimization experienced by victims (Hill 2004). According to Hill (2004, 83), victimization through terrorism may be experienced at direct, secondary, and community levels, all of which may vary in terms of the extent and kind of victimization. Staiger et al. (2008) present a similar classification of victims of terrorism. The authors note that although the term "victim" may be used to refer to all individuals that experience some form of direct injury, emotional harm and or suffering as a result of an act of terrorism, vicarious or indirect victims are individuals that were not direct targets of terrorists, but nonetheless experienced fear, anxiety and other related stressors following a terrorist attack (i.e. the general public). This notion of direct and indirect victimization is significant because it highlights the importance of considering the needs of the general public alongside the needs of victims and their families.

Not sure about Canada, but the United States Supreme Court has weighed in on this several times, in favor of free speech; most recently, Metal v Tam (June 19, 2007).

HOWEVER, when said speech crosses over into the "Let's figure out a way to hook up containers of acid to sprinklers at concert venues," that appears to be a form of terrorism?

Thatís why I think words and speech in themselves are harmless. There is a difference between just having an opinion or using certain words, and enticing others to do harm.

I donít mind people having a space on the internet to talk shit, even if it might be offensive to others. There is a big difference between having an online media so some people can say ďi hate fagsĒ, and having a media so they can plan setting a Cher concert into a bloodbath. As you say, the latter is a concious attempt to hurt a big group of people in a way that can be considered terrorism.

Police shot and killed 987 people in 2017 in the United States. That's 2 dozen more than in 2016. And, like in Canada, we aren't so good at keeping track, so that's for sure not ALL of the people shot and killed by police in the United States.

As a comparison as far as municipalities, Chicago police have killed 92 people in the last 6 years.

Anyway, yeah, NO police-related fatalities would be optimal, but the U.S. has a long way to go to get to that, that's why we Americans were, like, wow, your police didn't even KILL that guy!

I dare to say that in any part of the world there are positive reactions to tragedies. Toronto and Canada are not above any other place in that regard, itís just that part of human nature that sort of wakes up when terrible things like this happen.

Iím pretty disgusted by the media coverage of this sad event. It is so opportunistic and unnecessary, it just feeds the morbid mentality that steps all over those who will continue suffering for the death of their loved ones. But that is to be expected from the media and the mass mentality that will click on anything that feeds their sick need to be a part of a trend. Itís sickening, just like what the church did, a bunch of opportunistic vultures.